Auto-generating Outlook signatures using Active Directory data
Whilst working on a user provisioning solution with a customer, an interesting question arose. Now that the customer's AD has lots of useful information consolidated from HR, payroll and other systems, would it be possible to automatically create a standard e-mail signature for each employee?
The answer is yes. Obviously the attributes in AD need to be present, consistent and accurate - and this is where provisioning comes in - but this is a great example of productive usage of AD data.
The end result is that when a user creates a new email, a standard signature is appended including name, email address, job title etc.
Sample code, and more information for this type of solution is available at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues/2006/10/HeyScriptingGuy/default.aspx.
If, like a lot of customers, you need to get the actual data in place first, then a good place to start reading about the approaches and technologies involved is http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/idm/ilm.mspx.
